== Ruby Reports 1.0, Release Candidate 1 (0.10.0) ==
After 2.5 months of extremely overactive development since our last
major stable release, clandestine behaviours, and other things that go
bump in the night, a rough cut of what will become Ruport 1.0 is
finally ready.
We can really use your feedback, so if you've been waiting to try out
Ruport, now would be a good time to start. And since it's now on
RubyForge, you don't even need to trust our sketchy gem-server to try
it out!
== What is Ruport? ==
Ruby Reports (Ruport) is an extensible reporting system. It aims to
keep things as simple as possible while still providing the core
toolset you'll need for most reporting tasks.
== What can Ruport do for me? ==
(If you're already familiar with Ruport, you might want to skip this section)
We provide a solid data model that can be easily hooked up to a number
of sources, including CSV files, ActiveRecord models, and raw SQL
connections through DBI.
We also provide an insanely easy to extend formatting system which
provides a consistent interface as well as a set of helper functions
for a number of output types (HTML,PDF,CSV, and plain text).
On top of that, Ruport offers a bunch of little tools to tie things
together and help you be more productively lazy. This includes a high
level report interface, as well as a code generator (rope) that will
help lay out a project for you and do other cool things like generate
boilerplate code and tests when needed.
We're not aiming to be a comprehensive reporting solution, our primary
goal is to make reporting applications easier to build in Ruby, not
build them for you. That having been said, you can find things like
basic support for graphing and invoices in our ruport-util package.
This is likely going to take a little while to build up and stabilize,
but it should be a good way to add higher level functionality to your
Ruport projects as time goes on.
== Major Changes since 0.8 ==
* Real support for Grouping operations and rendering
* Row based rendering support
* A whole slew of PDF helper functions
* Built in support for ActiveRecord via acts_as_reportable (now in Ruport)
* Majorly revamped formatting / rendering system
* API impovements throughout
* All subsystems are more extensible now
* rope now has a ton of new features
* Plenty of things I've already forgotten
By Example:
http://tinyurl.com/33m88x
New, cooler examples will be out soon.
== Get it ==
Ruport and it's dependencies:
gem install ruport -y
The Ruport Utilities package(optional)
gem install ruport-util -y
== Get Help ==
Mailing List:
http://list.rubyreports.org
Please sign up even if you want to not receive any mails, so we know
who is interested in Ruport out there. All questions are welcome on
the list, both support related and development.
IRC:
#ruport on Freenode
API Documentation:
http://api.rubyreports.org/
We've fallen behind a bit on docs, sadly.
However, we did try to remove all deprecated documentation.
If you spot defects in the docs, or are having trouble understanding
them, please file bug reports
Trac Wiki:
Our wiki is at:
http://code.rubyreports.org
Keep an eye on it for helpful resources in the near future.
== Get Involved ==
We'd really appreciate feedback on this release so we can make tweaks
before 1.0. This is an early candidate, so we may end up changing
some things before Ruport is production ready.
You can file change requests and bug reports at:
http://code.rubyreports.org
Use the account ruport / blinky to file tickets, and tie them to the
milestone "1.0 RC1 Change Requests"
== That's all for now ==
We'll collect change requests for a little while, clean some stuff up,
add some more docs, and have a new release candidate out soon.
Looking forward to hearing what folks think!